“Dance Your Ph.D.” in VideoConfeDance: Developing a Blended-Method Dance Workshop for the Popularization of Science Through Choreography

Abstract

This teaching practice report concerns a doctoral workshop developed by the authors in order to prepare Ph.D. students to participate in “Dance Your Ph.D.” – an international contest of online videos, whereby doctoral students use dance to communicate their research. This workshop provides Ph.D. students with the theoretical and methodological basis, as well as choreographic tools, and the self-confidence necessary to take part in the contest. The first edition was organized fully online due to the COVID-19 lockdown. This initial constraint led to the development of a series of techniques that enabled holding a dance workshop remotely, using the Teams software. In this report, we describe how we adapted to organize the workshop online and how this led to pedagogical innovations that we continued to use in subsequent hybrid iterations of the workshop. Discussing the possibilities and challenges presented by our pedagogical approach, we position this text within related literature debates and identify directions for future research for both embodied and virtual pedagogies.